I went there for lunch today... They didn't have their whole menu up-and-running, no Dosa's and they are sourcing their faux-meats from "Oakland Chinatown" until they come up with their own recipes.

The atmosphere was way less pretentious than I expected, I kind of liked the colors on the wall, and the water tasted good.

Definitely some potential, the highlight of the restaurant is their brick oven and the pizza dough type of bread that they bake and use for all their sandwiches -- which was delicious. I got a deep-fried hotdog on a house-bun with saurkraut, which was good, and if they switch hotdog brands and refine the toppings could be a pretty great vegan dish.

This is pretty close to my house, so I'll probably check it out fairly soon.

_________________If you spit on my food I will blow your forking head off, you filthy shitdog. - MumblesDon't you know that vegan meat is the gateway drug to chicken addiction? Because GMO and trans-fats. - kaerlighed

I'd be curious to know how gluten-free-friendly it is, if you guys wouldn't mind bending an eye towards that while you're there. If the highlights are sandwiches and pizza and so on, then I'm guessing not so much. But I know I had it tagged in my mind as a place to check out, so maybe once dosas are up and running they'll have more to offer?

We stopped in for lunch today on the way back from the yacht club. (Really. Ask Coldandsleepy.)

I was in a bad mood because I was tired and don't like driving in SF at the best of times. Manual transmissions plus ridiculous hills make for a stinky drive and a lot of use of the handbrake. That said, by the time we finished eating the food had made up for a lot of it.

If I'd seen something about the whole "multidimensional dining experience" thing before I'd gone there I probably would have been leery about the place. Once you're in there it's actually pretty low-key. The menu is a little cutesy, using "cluck" and "moo" in place of their meat-like proteins, but I think it's as good a way to communicate the goal of the dish as any, and it avoids what I've seen elsewhere-- either just saying it's all veg*n at the top of the menu and calling it "chicken" or putting "mock" in front of everything. One is confusing and one is unwieldy. It's a big step up from "Chick'n" or "chik."

There was a crowd of hipsters in front of us, milling around and taking a long time to order. While we were looking at the menu, a waiter or something came by and asked if we'd been there before, gave the obligatory "here's what our menu is and what 'cluck' and 'moo' mean" talk, and recommended a couple of things. One of them, the Chili Cluck (pizza) Pie looked good to me, so I ordered it. Coldandsleepy ordered the Bahn Mi pita sandwich thing. Drinks were their house root beer and ginger ale. (I don't know if they're house-made or what, but they were good-- very flavorful and interesting.)

The sandwich showed up almost immediately, and the waiter said they'd put on some of their house-made sriracha sauce. The fries were good-sized shoestrings, not as big as a steak fry but still pretty big, and were delicious. The sriracha was very flavorful and a little sweeter than real sriracha. The sandwich filling was excellent, but this isn't a sandwich that works as a pita-- it disintegrated and the innards had to be eaten with a fork. It might have worked better on a baguette or something, and she says it was good and she'd eat it again, but be warned that it's not walking-and-eating food if that's what you're looking for.

As she started to take the first bite of the sandwich, a waiter came by and apologized for my pizza taking longer to make and brought me, unprompted, a complimentary small house salad. It was fantastic-- bitter greens, nice tiny sweet raisins, small chunks of cucumber-- turns out I LIKE cucumber on salads when they're in little dice-sized bits rather than big flavorless slabs of watery dullness. And when they're coated in dressing. I usually mutter under my breath about hippy bullshiitake when offered things with hemp seeds in them, but this turned out to be pretty tasty. I am easily bored by salads. I don't think I'd want a huge bowl of this, but I could have eaten twice the tiny side salad-sized plate and been pretty happy with it.

As I took the second bite of the salad, my pizza arrived. I don't think I'd have noticed any delay if they hadn't mentioned it. I was surprised they could make it that fast, really...

Holy crepe, man. That pizza is badass. I would step on people I sort of like to get more of it. (Not people I like, although that's mostly out of politeness. I'd ask them to move aside.)

I can't adequately describe it. It was sort of like chili, sort of like a really super-rich pizza, deep and tomatoey, savory out the wazoo, a little spicy ("tomracha" sauce is apparently tomatoes and sriracha), and the balsamic glaze is startling and sort of ties the whole thing together. I ate the living shiitake out of that pizza and didn't share it because I am mean and selfish. Note that I got the version with cheese, BUT it was a very very tiny amount and they do make it vegan if you ask. Seriously, I couldn't taste it and didn't notice it. (I thought it just had a little parmesan on top and had to go check the menu to see that it had mozzarella too-- that's how little there was.) The important flavors were all the sauces and stuff-- I think it's the combination of the tomato, spicy sauce, and balsamic. (I've recently become more aware of balsamic vinegar, so this was an interesting application of it.) They said they could make anything on the menu vegan, and that would would certainly work well for this.

(I didn't actually try more than a bite of the Bahn Mi pita, so I can't go on and on about it as much as this. I suspect it was quite tasty.)

We were stuffed and had to head back to Santa Cruz, so we picked up a couple of their desserts to take with us. We picked their "twinkee" (mostly out of curiosity), a strawberry snowball, and a vegan rice crispy treat, since I'm a sucker for those. All of their desserts are vegan so we had a hard time choosing...

The "twinkee" was nice and spongy and the filling tasted a bit of marshmallow. Yum. Recommended! The snowball was cakier and less spongy than the commercial original, and also very tasty. The rice crispy treat was a little less marshmallowy than I prefer them-- I think that if we hadn't just had two fantastic desserts I'd be more excited about it, since it's certainly GOOD, it's just not as awesome as the others. I shared a little with the Emperor, and the second half, which I saved for after he went to bed, will go down the hatch as soon as I finish writing this up.

So let's see... The atmosphere is very, um, clean. Kind of Ikea-cafeteria-y, but a little more upscale. They have a sort of weird tent-enclosed dining area outside where the hipsters ate. The pizza oven is visible when you order and is actually pretty cool, kind of a big Chinese dragon thing. When I ordered my pizza, the guy who took my order turned around and shouted, "Hey, Pizza Boy! Make me another chili cluck!" The service was attentive and friendly, and not intrusive. They brought an extra cup of water and a straw for the boy, which not everyplace we've been will do. (Some places will give toddlers, like, their own pint glass of water. The next thing we ask for is usually towels.) The super-friendly guy who recommended the pizza carried the high chair over for us, and generally paid attention. The place wasn't totally empty or anything, although at 3:00 Saturday afternoon it was pretty much us and the hipsters and a couple of other people.

So yeah-- it was good enough that I went from irritable to cheerful in one meal. The hippy bullshiitake isn't intrusive-- they were playing something between indie rock and soulful songstresses and there was kind of a waterfall/subtle-light-show thing going on along one wall. There was a flyer on the table saying something about, I dunno. Blah blah, water infused with healing energy blah and some other stuff. It was MUCH less creepy than a Supreme Master restaurant, and not like the Cafe friggin Gratitude. (They're opening one in Santa Cruz. It is to weep.)

A+++++ would eat again.

(Coldandsleepy has been poking me to go finish that rice crispy treat. I am adding another paragraph in order to drag it out more. Now she's poking me. All right, all right.)

I really liked it too. The filling in the banh mi was great-- nice zingy marinated vegetables/slaw, savory and not overly salty protein. Good ratio of one to the other. But the pita... I love pita as much as the next person, but it really didn't work for me here. It got instantly soggy and fell apart, meaning that what I got was not so much a sandwich but a pile of tasty filling hidden in shreds of gummy pita. I pulled most of the pita off and ate the innards with a fork.

The twinkee and the snowball were amazing though. Reminiscent of the originals but BETTER. The twinkee especially... and I have to tell you that it was the one of the three desserts we tried that I was least interested in to start with. The sponge was really delightfully light and had this amazing caramel flavor to it. The frosting was not overly greasy (do you know what I mean?) in that way that vegan frostings can sometimes be, and it tasted like marshmallows. Oh man, so good.

Definitely would eat at again. Definitely would go to just for dessert. Definitely good that I live 2+ hours away from this restaurant.

ETA: Service was really good as solipsistnation said though one of the guys at the register seemed almost irritated to be taking our order. He was the exception though, everyone else was super nice. Presentation was nothing to write home about, kinda just food slapped on a plate, but for a < $10 entree I could give a shiitake. The atmosphere of the place was not bad at all though again, nothing special... not particularly kooky either. The location is kind of sketchy looking but then where in SF isn't?

I'd be curious to know how gluten-free-friendly it is, if you guys wouldn't mind bending an eye towards that while you're there. If the highlights are sandwiches and pizza and so on, then I'm guessing not so much. But I know I had it tagged in my mind as a place to check out, so maybe once dosas are up and running they'll have more to offer?

i believe they use all gluten free pasta? So for something like the mac n' cheese you just have to make sure they leave off the bread crumbs.

Did we know that this closed like last week? This is a tough one for me but only because my best friend LOVED it. I personally thought it was nothing special. I had one of the worst meals of my life there and couldn't eat for a day or two afterwards. It was sadness. But they had amazing gluten free AND vegan desserts. Then they changed pastry chefs and everything went to hell. Still sad to lose another one.